There is a specific kind of etiquette on Twitter. The Twitter Etiquette Guide For Dummies article shows you the different ways of making sure that you follow proper etiquette, especially when using this social networking site for professional purposes.
Twitter Manners: Think of it this way: When talking online is the same if they call on the phone.
- Be gracious and tell the truth. Twitter is about conversation, not a monologue.
- Don’t just follow people; engage them with a sense of humour.
- Don’t follow someone expecting him to follow you back. Follow because you’re interested in what the person has to say. (Conversely, and somewhat ironically, if someone does follow you, it’s courteous to follow back.)
- Don’t tweet too much (more than 20 times per day). If you have a lot of ideas, use a program like Hootsuite to schedule your tweets.
- Listen to your followers. Show interest and ask questions.
- Don’t be afraid to ask for a retweet when it’s really important. (This is best utilized when it’s to help out someone else.)
- Don’t retweet people who retweet you, unless you’re responding and quoting them. e.g. “RT @JeffGoins are you crazy?! // You bet.”
- Promote other people’s stuff (blog posts, photos, websites, etc.)
- Talk about other people more than you do about yourself. A good rule of thumb is the 20:1 ratio.
Don’t ignore someone when they talk about you – even if it’s bad - If you say something to someone and they answer, you’re now in a conversation, don’t ignore them.
- Don’t ask random questions that have nothing to do with anything.
- Use autoresponders and automated messages sparingly.
- Stop yelling at people. Typing in all caps, in bold, underlining things, don’t use too much exclamation points and don’t repeat the same information over and over
- When someone says something nice or shares your information say ‘thank you’, and when you ask someone to do something for you, say please.
Tips to Tweet with Etiquette
- Use 120 characters in your post so people can retweet with RT@username in front of your post.
- When you forward on someone else’s tweet, it’s etiquette to put RT@username before the copied tweet
- Use the username like this@username (no space)
- DM – short for direct message – for conducting private conversations. Check yours in the right-hand column of your homepage
- Trending topics on your home page are the most popular topics on Twitter, you can also customise your own trending list.
- The hashtag: # is used to organize your posts, create and surf trends. Many trending topics have a # tag before them. For example, follow Friday #friday or #fridayfun to say something funny to your followers on Friday 🙂
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